A Sign of Thanks

There happens to be a business next door to my house that does a bunch of work with steel sheet goods. They recently received a LARGE shipment from South America on pallets that measured 4×10 feet. They stacked the four massive pallets outside and when I happened to walk by them yesterday, I noticed the very “exotic” looking woods that made up most of the runners.

I stopped in and casually asked what they planned on doing with them. “Firewood, I guess” was the response. OMG! I mentioned the nature of the wood and asked if I could harvest a few boards and they very graciously told me to take all four pallets! Sweet!

I took one of the runners and removed the nails, planed and ripped it down the center and here’s what I saw – fantastic!

In thanks to them, I created this sign for them on my scrollsaw. It measures 4×28” and is around 1/4” thick.

I’ll give this to them tomorrow – hope they like it!

If anyone can help me with what species of wood this happens to be I would be very grateful – it is very heavy/dense for it’s size as well as a bit “waxy”. Sort of like Ipe. If you look at Pic 4 you can see the wonderful striping in it.

Isn’t it amazing what’s used in pallets, a lot of the pallets I get from work come from countries that use these exotic woods the way we use stuff like pine. In most cases they have so much of that wood they don’t see the beauty like a woodworker does. I would guess from the pictures it looks like teak, although I have not used teak in several years. The sign came out really nice.

-- Martin ....always count the number of fingers you have before, and after using the saw.

my guess would be teak also. I used to get lots of pallets from the sheet metal shop where I worked, They were 4×4’s 10 feet long and came from Asia. All sorts of exotic woods. That is what got me started in wood working, all that free wood. Good find and nice sign.

Enoelf echoed to the letter what I was about to say – I KNOW Pete is trying to look out for me (and I thank you for it my friend!), but if you read to the bottom of the article you can see the creator of it is in the business of making plastic pallets. I would guess this might be slightly prejudiced against wood. ;-)

I DO know there are risks using certain pallets for lumber. Some are treated with nasty insect sprays. Some have hidden metal in them that can ruin a planer. And some, I am sure, harbor bacteria as the article states.

These particular pallets were created to ship one thing one time – a massive amount of steel.